Comment by victoro

It's tough to avoid this thinking because examples of employees being treated like cogs are often systemic and very public -- like stack ranking at big companies that everyone (even people that don't work there) either knows about or ends up knowing about. Meanwhile, examples of managers risking their own skin are more likely to be individual and private -- sometimes to the point that the affected employee doesn't even know it happened because it was behind the scenes -- like a manager defending a performance review of an employee in a calibration meeting with other managers.